Navigation

python-social-auth uses an extendible pipeline mechanism where developers can
introduce their functions during the authentication, association and
disconnection flows.

The functions will receive a variable set of arguments related to the current
process, common arguments are the current strategy, user (if any) and
request. It’s recommended that all the function also define an **kwargs
in the parameters to avoid errors for unexpected arguments.

Each pipeline entry can return a dict or None, any other type of return
value is treated as a response instance and returned directly to the client,
check Partial Pipeline below for details.

If a dict is returned, the value in the set will be merged into the
kwargs argument for the next pipeline entry, None is taken as if {}
was returned.

The final process of the authentication workflow is handled by an operations
pipeline where custom functions can be added or default items can be removed to
provide a custom behavior. The default pipeline is a mechanism that creates
user instances and gathers basic data from providers.

The default pipeline is composed by:

(# Get the information we can about the user and return it in a simple# format to create the user instance later. On some cases the details are# already part of the auth response from the provider, but sometimes this# could hit a provider API.'social_core.pipeline.social_auth.social_details',# Get the social uid from whichever service we're authing thru. The uid is# the unique identifier of the given user in the provider.'social_core.pipeline.social_auth.social_uid',# Verifies that the current auth process is valid within the current# project, this is where emails and domains whitelists are applied (if# defined).'social_core.pipeline.social_auth.auth_allowed',# Checks if the current social-account is already associated in the site.'social_core.pipeline.social_auth.social_user',# Make up a username for this person, appends a random string at the end if# there's any collision.'social_core.pipeline.user.get_username',# Send a validation email to the user to verify its email address.# Disabled by default.# 'social_core.pipeline.mail.mail_validation',# Associates the current social details with another user account with# a similar email address. Disabled by default.# 'social_core.pipeline.social_auth.associate_by_email',# Create a user account if we haven't found one yet.'social_core.pipeline.user.create_user',# Create the record that associates the social account with the user.'social_core.pipeline.social_auth.associate_user',# Populate the extra_data field in the social record with the values# specified by settings (and the default ones like access_token, etc).'social_core.pipeline.social_auth.load_extra_data',# Update the user record with any changed info from the auth service.'social_core.pipeline.user.user_details',)

It’s possible to override it by defining the setting SOCIAL_AUTH_PIPELINE.
For example, a pipeline that won’t create users, just accept already registered
ones would look like this:

Note that this assumes the user is already authenticated, and thus the user key
in the dict is populated. In cases where the authentication is purely external, a
pipeline method must be provided that populates the user key. Example:

It is also possible to define pipelines on a per backend basis by defining a setting
such as SOCIAL_AUTH_TWITTER_PIPELINE. Backend specific pipelines will override
the non specific pipelines (i.e. the default pipeline and SOCIAL_AUTH_PIPELINE).

Each pipeline function will receive the following parameters:

Current strategy (which gives access to current store, backend and request)

Like the authentication pipeline, it’s possible to define a disconnection
pipeline if needed.

For example, this can be useful on sites where a user that disconnects all the
related social account is required to fill a password to ensure the
authentication process in the future. This can be accomplished by overriding
the default disconnection pipeline and setup a function that checks if the user
has a password, in case it doesn’t a redirect to a fill-your-password form can
be returned and later continue the disconnection process, take into account
that disconnection ensures the POST method by default, a simple method to
ensure this, is to make your form POST to /disconnect/ and set the needed
password in your pipeline function. Check Partial Pipeline below.

In order to override the disconnection pipeline, just define the setting:

SOCIAL_AUTH_DISCONNECT_PIPELINE=(# Verifies that the social association can be disconnected from the current# user (ensure that the user login mechanism is not compromised by this# disconnection).'social_core.pipeline.disconnect.allowed_to_disconnect',# Collects the social associations to disconnect.'social_core.pipeline.disconnect.get_entries',# Revoke any access_token when possible.'social_core.pipeline.disconnect.revoke_tokens',# Removes the social associations.'social_core.pipeline.disconnect.disconnect',)

Backend specific disconnection pipelines can also be defined with a setting such as
SOCIAL_AUTH_TIWTTER_DISCONNECT_PIPELINE.

It’s possible to pause the pipeline to return to the user asking for
some action and resume it later.

To accomplish this decorate the function that will cut the process
with the @partial decorator located at social/pipeline/partial.py.

When it’s time to resume the process just redirect the user to /complete/<backend>/
or /disconnect/<backend>/ view. The pipeline will resume in the same
function that cut the process.

@partial stores needed data into a database table name social_auth_partial.
This table holds the needed information to resume it later from any browsers and
drops the old dependency on browser sessions that made the move between broswsers
impossible.

The partial data is idetified by a UUID token that can be used to store in the
session or append to any URL using the partial_token parameter (default value).
The lib will pick this value from the request and load the needed partial data to
let the user continue the process.

The pipeline functions will get a current_partial instance that containes the
partial token and the needed data that will be saved in the database.

There’s a pipeline to validate email addresses, but it relies a lot on your
project.

The pipeline is at social_core.pipeline.mail.mail_validation and it’s a partial
pipeline, it will return a redirect to a URL that you can use to tell the
users that an email validation was sent to them. If you want to mention the
email address you can get it from the session under the key email_validation_address.

In order to send the validation python-social-auth needs a function that will
take care of it, this function is defined by the developer with the setting
SOCIAL_AUTH_EMAIL_VALIDATION_FUNCTION. It should be an import path. This
function should take four arguments strategy, backend, code and
partial_token.

partial_token is the same token used on other partials functions
that can be used to restart a halted flow.

code is a model instance used to validate the email address, it
contains three fields:

code='...'

Holds an uuid.uuid4() value and it’s the code used to identify the
validation process.

email='...'

Email address trying to be validate.

verified=True/False

Flag marking if the email was verified or not.

You should use the code in this instance to build the link for email
validation which should go to /complete/email?verification_code=<codehere>. If you are using
Django, you can do it with:

The main purpose of the pipeline (either creation or deletion pipelines) is to
allow extensibility for developers. You can jump in the middle of it, do
changes to the data, create other models instances, ask users for extra data,
or even halt the whole process.

Extending the pipeline implies:

Writing a function

Locating the function in an accessible path
(accessible in the way that it can be imported)

Overriding the default pipeline definition with one that includes
newly created function.

The part of writing the function is quite simple. However please be careful
when placing your function in the pipeline definition, because order
does matter in this case! Ordering of functions in SOCIAL_AUTH_PIPELINE
will determine the value of arguments that each function will receive.
For example, adding your function after social_core.pipeline.user.create_user
ensures that your function will get the user instance (created or already existent)
instead of a None value.

The pipeline functions will get quite a lot of arguments, ranging from the
backend in use, different model instances, server requests and provider
responses. To enumerate a few:

strategy

The current strategy instance.

backend

The current backend instance.

uid

User ID in the provider, this uid should identify the user in the
current provider.

response={}orobject()

The server user-details response, it depends on the protocol in use (and
sometimes the provider implementation of such protocol), but usually it’s
just a dict with the user profile details in such provider. Lots of
information related to the user is provided here, sometimes the scope
will increase the amount of information in this response on OAuth
providers.

details={}

Basic user details generated by the backend, used to create/update the user
model details (this dict will contain values like username,
email, first_name, last_name and fullname).

user=None

The user instance (or None if it wasn’t created or retrieved from the
database yet).

social=None

This is the associated UserSocialAuth instance for the given user (or
None if it wasn’t created or retrieved from the DB yet).

Usually when writing your custom pipeline function, you just want to get some
values from the response parameter. But you can do even more, like call
other APIs endpoints to retrieve even more details about the user, store them
on some other place, etc.

Here’s an example of a simple pipeline function that will create a Profile
class instance, related to the current user. This profile will store some simple details
returned by the provider (Facebook in this example). The usual Facebook
response looks like this:

Now all that’s needed is to tell python-social-auth to use our function in
the pipeline. Since the function uses user instance, we need to put it after
social_core.pipeline.user.create_user:

SOCIAL_AUTH_PIPELINE=('social_core.pipeline.social_auth.social_details','social_core.pipeline.social_auth.social_uid','social_core.pipeline.social_auth.auth_allowed','social_core.pipeline.social_auth.social_user','social_core.pipeline.user.get_username','social_core.pipeline.user.create_user','path.to.save_profile',# <--- set the path to the function'social_core.pipeline.social_auth.associate_user','social_core.pipeline.social_auth.load_extra_data','social_core.pipeline.user.user_details',)

So far the function we created returns None, which is taken as if {} was returned.
If you want the profile object to be available to the next function in the
pipeline, all you need to do is return {'profile':profile}.